I wanted to grab the root filesystem image from the flash memory of the
Cab.Link CLS-D4E2WX1 cable modem/router.
The way to do this was the same as with Grabbing the firmware from the Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH and extracting the root filesystem
although I decided to just dump the root filesystem image and not the
entire flash memory.
So the box was opened again, the usb serial interface connected to the
uart pins on Cab.Link CLS-D4E2WX1
I found earlier and the boot stopped in the U-Boot process.
First step was to determine where in the memory map the root filesystem
image would be. This took a bit of calculation. From the bootup messages
there are two important hints:
So the kernel image is booted from address 0x9f670000 and it's in the
MTD partition at 0x000000670000. This makes the guess that the rootfs
image from 0x000000050000 will live at memory location
0x9f050000 and has a size of 0x620000 so the approach is to
dump 0x620000 bytes starting at that memory location. The command to do that
in U-Boot:
Last year a World Radiosport Team Championship was planned again, this time
in Italy: the World Radiosport Team Championship 2022 Italy
but due to well-known reasons international travel from all corners of the
world to Italy wasn't a good idea, so the news was:
WRTC 2022 postponed to 2023 ! - WRTC 2022 Italy.
In the first half of 2022 they had an award to promote the event among radio
amateurs: WRTC 2022 Award - WRTC 2022 Italy and
I participated during those months and got digital awards. Contacts were in
different modes (SSB, CW, FT8, RTTY) on a lot of HF bands with special
event stations in regions of Italy.
In January 2023 they are doing it again, this time only in CW and SSB and only
on bands that are also active in the WRTC contest in July, this time with
stations in multiple countries: WRTC 2023 AWARD : January 2023…headset on! - WRTC 2022 Italy. So I'm trying to get different stations in the
log on different bands. It's working out fine so far, I even got a new
country in CW (Indonesia). I also used the clubstation to get these special
event stations on the 80 meter band.
This is fun and a good promotion for the upcoming WRTC.
Result
In the end I made 122 contacts with WRTC special event stations in January
2022.
Eight and a half years and over 14000 contacts after I bought a
Yaesu FT-857D
I thought it was time to upgrade. The basic requirements haven't changed a
lot: HF, 2 meter, 70 centimeter bands, SSB, Morse, FM, support for computer
control. What I wanted to improve on is noise filtering, handling of strong
adjacent signals and a waterfall display.
So the choice is the Yaesu FT-991A although I also looked at HF-only radios
from Yaesu but decided on this one in the end. This will be the base station
radio for a while and I will only use the FT-857D for operating away from
home.
The basic installation went fine and I think this is a great amateur radio and
good value for money. It is an advanced technological device so I had to dig
into manuals and on-line documentation several times to get things set up the
way I wanted it.
The good innovation is that the Yaesu FT-991A has an USB port on the back.
This USB connection gives the computer 2 serial ports and audio over USB.
The first serial port is for Computer Aided Tuning (CAT) control which
can control the radio from the computer.
I directly wanted to set up an udev rule to map this to a fixed symlink so
I can start rigtctld easily. The new rule:
The ENV{ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM}=="00", filter only makes this rule
activate on the first of the serial ports offered by the CP2105 chip.
My current experience is that the noise filtering is indeed better which
helps a lot in the noisy RF environment at home.
Recently I wanted to have the option to install ubuntu on a PC so I created
a USB stick with dd. It worked fine and in the end the existing ubuntu on the
PC worked ok and could be upgraded and made available again.
So I wanted to revert this USB stick to the normal filesystem that both Windows
and Linux can read and write. This turned out to be more difficult than I
expected! First I thought Windows could revert the USB stick to a usable state
but this turned out to be impossible. I tried on three Windows 10 systems with
admin accounts, but none of them were able to create a usable partition and
filesystem! The best result I could get was an error something couldn't be
started to format the partition, but without any explanation what couldn't be
started. Things that were once perfectly doable under MS-DOS are now
impossible.
Back to linux to try and find the right partition type and filesystem options
to get access again. I could do a lot of things in linux, but I failed to
find the right settings that Windows would see as usable storage.
I shared my problems on irc and someone there had the following list of
commands to fix this problem:
Which needs to be adjusted for the right device node. Use at your own risk!
But indeed after these commands both Windows and Linux were perfectly capable
of writing and reading the USB stick.
Time for an overview of what happened in amateur radio in 2022 for me.
Like previous years I will look back at the plans and what happened.
Looking back at Closing 2021 in amateur radio
the following results are clear:
Try to get more countries/entities, especially in morse. I am working
towards DXCC in morse: 100 entities confirmed.
And one thing is both a result of 2022 and an item for 2023: I ordered a
new radio: a Yaesu FT-911A, HF, VHF, UHF all mode at the end of 2022 and it
was delivered last week. That will be a separate post.
Like a bit of a yearly event it was time for the UBA PSK63 prefix contest
last weekend.
On Saturday propagation on the higher frequencies was not cooperating a lot so
I went to the 40 meter band late in the afternoon. On Sunday things were
better, I even got one whole contact on the 10 meter band. A lot of the
contacts were in search and pounce mode. On Sunday I ended with the last half
hour of the contest calling CQ UBA PSK TEST and managed to get a few new
stations in the log. Some of those contacts came at a fast pace with even
a small pile-up where I had to ask only one prefix to answer.
I ended with 111 contacts logged, which is a good number for a digital mode
contest.
Na alle gemopper over de DSL verbinding hier een eerste brief over de aanleg
van glasvezel.
De planning is erg ruim:
In februari starten we met aanleggen. [..]
Als het goed is kunnen heel Overvecht en Utrecht Noordwest half 2024 next
level internetten. Je kunt dan een abonnement afsluiten bij T-Mobile.
Anco: Met Open Dutch Fiber ligt het gecompliceerder. Hoewel we al geruime tijd
onderhandelen heeft dat nog niet tot iets concreets geleid. De enige provider
die nu wordt toegelaten op dit netwerk is T-Mobile. Dat vinden wij een slechte
zaak. Daarom zijn we bijna geneigd ze 'Closed Dutch Fiber' te noemen. We zijn
continu bezig om een opening te vinden om met ODF tot een oplossing te komen.
Helaas, vooralsnog zonder resultaat. Dat er een dag komt dat we op dit netwerk
actief worden is wel zeker, wanneer dat zal zijn is nog volledig onduidelijk.
Ik ben benieuwd hoe het gaat lopen. Ze mogen fiber aanleggen, we gaan er
alleen geen T-Mobile abonnement over nemen.
De aankondiging van de gemeente Utrecht is vrij duidelijk: het moet een open
netwerk worden met providerkeuze. Dus als ze eerst fiber aanleggen en die
providerkeuze er vervolgens niet is kan dat juridisch aangepakt worden.
Bron Overeenkomst glasvezelnetwerk: Utrecht in 5 jaar volledig “verglaasd” - Gemeente Utrecht
met
Open Dutch Fiber legt een ‘open’ glasvezelnetwerk
aan in Utrecht. Dit betekent dat alle providers die dit willen over dit netwerk
diensten kunnen leveren aan hun klanten.
Gefeliciteerd! Op dit moment zijn wij bezig met de
voorbereidende werkzaamheden voor de aanleg van glasvezel in Utrecht. In het 1e
kwartaal 2024 komen wij bij jou in de wijk.
Update 2023-02-06:
Laatste bericht van Freedom: Wanneer komt Freedom op het Open Dutch Fiber netwerk?.
De huidige status is dus 'in theorie zou Freedom beschikbaar moeten komen een
jaar na de installatie van Open Dutch Fiber glasvezel'.
If you're bored enough to look at the sources for my webpages you'll notice
I make a lot of use of
<base href="https://idefix.net/~koos/">
This changes the base for all relative urls from https://idefix.net/
to https://idefix.net/~koos/
because my whole site is based on being in my userdir, but
https://idefix.net/ is the easy url.
I use a lot of relative urls for local things because why make them longer.
And this eases developing and debugging on the developer site.
All browsers support the 'base href' meta tag, but some bots ignore it.
And there has been a case a few years ago where a bug in one script made
all urls seem 'below' other urls. The net result is that my logs are currently
filled with entries like:
all those entries seem for http:// versions of the urls so I now adjusted
the http to https redirect function to stop at urls that look like
^\/~koos/irregular.php\/.+\.cgi to give a status 410 immediately.
This 'saves' a bit of traffic because it never gets the redirect to the https
version.
While checking this I see multiple stupid bots, like:
This weekend was the ARRL RTTY Roundup
and I participated. Not for very long because there were other things in the
weekend, including the New Year's celebration at my own radio club.
In the end I made 30 contacts, Saturday evening and Sunday evening after dark.
On Saturday evening it was hard to find another station, not a lot of signals
and a lot of noise on the 40 meter band.
Raw score: 30 Qpts x 21 Mults = 630
Recently I was looking at some reports of the affiliate income generated
by The Virtual Bookcase and
it hasn't generated a cent in a few years.
This is probably fully related to the fact I haven't paid any attention to the
site both in code and content for years. The only commits in 2022 were due to a
vulnerability found in the site. Most commits to the code for the site were
before 2010. Time to admit to myself I need to stop doing this. There are other
things that take my time and give me joy.
If someone else wants to take over: get in touch. I'm not sure which parts of
the database are of any use to people and which parts I shouldn't transfer due
to Dutch privacy laws but we'll figure it out. If nobody wants it, I will start
giving 410 gone status from 1 september 2023 and end the domain registration in
November 2023.
The original announcement of starting the site, dated 28 march 1999:
I've created a virtual bookcase with an overview of books I like/read.. visit the site too!
which is also the oldest newsitem in my archive.
Naast het gebruiken van bitcoin om
mensen af te persen
is er altijd ook de optie om in te breken op bitcoin accounts om de buttcoins
van anderen te stelen. Het voordeel van het niet gebruiken van banken voor
geldzaken is dat je ook niet de mogelijkheid hebt om misdaad met geld te
onderzoeken dus als je de buttcoins kan stelen kun je er mee wegkomen.
Vandaag ontving ik een phishing mail die van 'Bitvavo' zou zijn, wat blijkbaar
iets doet met buttcoins en andere cryptocurrencies. Verder hebben de criminelen
goed opgelet bij phishing mails voor banken en gebruiken ze de standaard
methodes van phishing: urgentie, voldoen aan regelgeving en een simpele
handeling om toegang te krijgen tot je rekening. Met als toegevoegde stap de
qrcode zodat je niet zomaar een url-analyzer af kan laten gaan op je mail en je
de phishing site (dus de 'verificatiestappen') opent in je mobiele browser en
minder makkelijk dingen kan controleren.
Het spoor:
De qrcode scant naar http://lnkiy.in/VKwZG
Redirect: https://360corporatetours.com/wp-admin/images/bit.php deze url ziet er uit als een gehackte wordpress site.
Hier komt een html redirect naar: https://bitvavo.22497-4837.s2.webspace.re/
En dat ziet er erg uit als een bitvavo login page.
Update 2023-01-12
Ik heb ondertussen geleerd dat het prima mogelijk is om bitcoin te traceren,
dit is de primaire activiteit van het bedrijf 'Chainalysis'. In de Darknet
diaries podcast is dit uitgebreid besproken in de aflevering
Welcome To Video - Darknet Diaries.
De aflevering gaat over een groot onderzoek waarin bitcoin chain analysis het
mogelijk maakte om verdachten op te sporen.
One of the most important ways for me to get contacts confirmed in amateur
radio is via the Logbook of The World by the ARRL.
I noticed the LoTW website was very slow yesterday and today, sometimes giving
internal server errors. As a lot of radio amateurs should notice this,
I had a look around and soon found mention at LOTW is Struggling! - amateurradio
which confirms that the site is slow at the moment. There is a way to see
how busy the site is processing uploads at LoTW Queue Status Page
and the backlog is currently 11 to 13 hours.
According to some comments in the reddit thread this is caused by people
uploading their contacts once a year. I've had contacts where it took a while
to confirm them because the other side wasn't uploading to LoTW on a regular
basis but I never suspected some people do this just once a year.
The upside is I now have a new country confirmed on several bands at once. And
maybe more confirmations will show up. I do have some countries in my list with
the note 'not a regular LoTW uploader'.